Vice President Joe Biden at a fundraiser tonight called President Obama’s plan to kill Osama bin Laden in Pakistan the most “audacious” military venture in the past five centuries.

Biden spoke for more than 20 minutes at the private home in Morris Township, N.J., where he helped haul in $400,000 in campaign funds for Sen. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.).

While comparing his Irish background with Menendez’s Cuban ancestry, and praising the senator for supporting administration endeavors such as the Recovery Act, Biden spent a healthy amount of his speech promoting his boss and pitching for four more years.

Saying he spends 4 to 6 hours a day with Obama, Biden recounted the day they got bin Laden, according to the pool report.

“You can go back 500 years. You cannot find a more audacious plan,” Biden said. “Never knowing for certain. We never had more than a 48% probability that he was there.”

“Do any one of you have a doubt that if that raid failed that this guy would be a one-term president?” he added. “This guy is willing to do the right thing and risk losing.”

Biden called Obama “smart as hell” and said he makes a decision with “no whining.”

“I give you my word as a Biden I’m more optimistic about the United States chances in the world today than when I got elected 40 years ago as a 29-year-old kid,” he said. “Not only is (Menendez) going to win. Not only are the president and I going to win. I believe we’re going to win back the House of Representatives.”

The vice president also took potshots at the Republican presidential field.

“We should sponsor another 20 debates. Think of the things they say. Think of the things they say about women,” Biden said.

“I mean, it’s just absolutely staggering the things they say,” he continued. “Between Gingrich and Romney and Santorum, I think if I told you — if I just listed the things, the outrageous things — well, from my perspective, outrageous things — they’ve said, I think you would have thought I’m making it up.”

Bridget Johnson is a veteran journalist whose news articles and opinion columns have run in dozens of news outlets across the globe. Bridget first came to Washington to be online editor at The Hill, where she wrote The World from The Hill column on foreign policy. Previously she was an opinion writer and editorial board member at the Rocky Mountain News and nation/world news columnist at the Los Angeles Daily News.
She is an NPR contributor and has contributed to USA Today, The Wall Street Journal, National Review Online, Politico and more, and has myriad television and radio credits as a commentator. Bridget is Washington Editor for PJ Media.

To hear him and his supporters tell it, Barack Obama was born in a manger in Bethlehem, rappelled from a helicopter onto a rooftop in Abbottabad, personally killing Osama bin Laden with his bare hands, and was back in America before tee time the next day…or was it tea time? Can’t be, everyone knows how much he hates the British, and those bastards, the Canadians who want to send us all that oil.

I always thought the Doolittle Raid on Tokyo was overhyped. The Rangers scaling the cliffs at Normandy were just kids playing Capture the Flag. And remember the cakewalk known as Iwo Jima? Obama is AWESOME!

Yes. The Seals do this sort of stuff regularly (although nothing like this is ever “routine”). Go see “Act of Valor” some time. It simply took 10 years to find Bin Laden, given that the Pakistani government was helping to hide him.

The guys who carried it out certainly displayed audacity, but Slow Joe had his nose so far up his owner’s ass, he kinda forgot to mention the guys who actually did the work. Sitting around watching it on t.v. and deciding whether or not to give the impoerial thumbs up or down, requires nothing more than a functioning wrist.

And, the idea that El Jefe had anything to do with operational planning is, to be perfectly frank, absurd.

Don’t forget that Obama gave some stealth helicopter tech to the Chinese in the Bonus Round! Too bad Mr. Audacious didn’t send in a heavy-lift helo to fly that sucker out (or enough H.E. to make it metal confetti at the bottom of a 50 foot crater).

Nabbing bin Laden was about as tough as invading Grenada. Only thing easier would have been hitting Abbotabad with half a dozen nukes, bin Laden pretty much thought that was going to be his fate back in 2001.

Biden is just a fruitcake, but I suppose Democraptic audiences eat him up, nuts and all.

To add to what’s already been said, Otto Skorzeny’s rescue of Mussolini was pretty audacious.

So was Philip Vian and HMS Cossack boarding the Altmark in neutral Norway and rescuing the POWs aboard.

So to was Napoleon Collins and USS Wachusett capturing CSS Florida in neutral Brazil.

Even more audacious was Thomas Boyle, captain of the American privateer Chasseur, who in 1814 declared that his ship was blockading the British Isles alone, and had a notice of that declaration posted on the door of Lloyd’s of London.

Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor (which could have been a disaster for Japan)

Lee at Chancellorsville

Winfield Scott in Mexico (truly audacious)

Which basically leads to this–the Bin Laden raid was in no way of greater daring than the most daring above. Which leads me to believe that you can go back the last five hundred years–you cannot find a larger idiot who has been closer to greater power. Only a complete moron ignorant of military history says what he did.

The attack on Pearl Harbor *was* a disaster for Japan. Tactically and operationally audacious? Sure, but still a disaster. In the spirit of “amateurs talk tactics; professionals talk logistics,” a factoid: in 1936, Japan produced about 35,000 cars. America produced 2 million. There was no way we were ever going to lose. Yamamoto knew this all too well, but he was about the only one who did.

Even on its own merits, the attack failed. They knew the carriers would be the most important weapon of the war and they failed to get even one, although that was a matter of providence. They didn’t hit the oil tank farm which would have forced the US Fleet to relocate to San Diego. The third wave was supposed to, but Gloomy Nagumo got cold feet (thus reducing the audacity factor) and really, that should have been their first target. And apparently, they didn’t even think to hit the sub pens. From day one, our subs, wretched torpedoes and all, would start hitting this island empire where it was most vulnerable, its sea lanes. The contribution of submarine warfare to winning that war was very under-reported.

By any measure, other than sinking obsolete capital ships, inflicting casualties and thoroughly pissing off an inherently isolationist country that could out-manufacture them 100 to 1 – once we really got going, it was a disaster that was the beginning of a longer more painful disaster.

My understanding is that the Japanese plan was to take over a whole bunch of real estate in the pacific while bloodying our nose enough to make us sue for peace. That was obviously a catastrophic miscalculation but at least it was a plan.

I do not disagree in any way that it was a plan, and it was pretty audacious. Personally, I think it wasn’t audacious enough. They should have gone whole hog and invaded Oahu. They probably would have won, and it would have taken a major campaign to drive them out. Depriving us of that forward base might have bought them another year. Just hitting the oil tanks might have bought them six more months. (And there would have been no Midway, but of course, that was an unknown at the time.) The real miscalculation was their complete lack of any effective plan to exploit their conquests rapidly enough to make a difference. Pearl Harbor was a bit like the Cardinals winning Game 6 of the 2011 World Series. It’s a great win, but it doesn’t much if you don’t win Game 7. In Japan’s case, they didn’t.

I’m going to throw in Nimitz’s decison to contest the Japanese at Midway. He had no guarantees the intel was correct, it was still three American carriers versus four (or possibly eight) Japanese—with better Japanese air wings (as the performance of both Hiryu strikes against Yorktown proved)– and he had only two more CVs that were going to be available for the next year if something went wrong. Even with the perfect intel, it still cost one carrier and might have cost all three if Nagumo had been able to get a deck strike off. Basically, Nimtz was gambling a lot–prudent gambling, but still gambling.

The decison to invade Guadalcanal by King was also pretty audacious, considering the support we could actually give it.

The real BS line was “We never had more than a 48% probability that he was there.”

No Intel analyst is going to give him a figure like that. It isn’t Star Trek, where Spock, apparently making up bogus probabilities to impress Kirk, proclaims “There is only a zero point two five nine four percent chance of success, Captain!”

In fact, the only way an intel analyst is going to give an actual number for the probability is when it can actually be calculated. And to calculate a probability, you have to have a data sample. A confirmed data sample.

In other words, the only way to say “it is 48% likely that he is there” is when you are really saying “In the past, we confirmed that on 48% of the occasions when indicators matched the present set, he was actually there.”

And the only way you can say THAT is to admit “On occasions in the past, we knew confirmed where he was.”

And what is the minimum sample necessary to give a prediction of “48%” instead of a rounded off 50%?

Twenty Five. To say “On 48% of occasions where indicators matched the present set, he was there” you have to say, at the very least, “On 12 of 25 previous periods of monitoring, we had indicators matching the present set, and Osama was confirmed to be present.”

Ergo, Biden is saying: “We acted now, on a 48% chance, after we passed up 12 instances where Osama’s presence was confirmed”.

…in 500 years??? Really. Well, several other operations have been noted in the thread here. I think Entebbe, and Jimmy Doolittle’s raid are just two that came to mind that were certainly in the same league. The subtle comment here is that BHO had anything to do with the success of this raid, other than not standing in the way!! For our illustrious dictator, this operation was like pulling teeth. And all he had to do was say yes. He had nothing to do with the planning. Good thing, too, judging from his success with dems running for office, and athletic teams he’s backed in pools. Whew!!! now THAT’S audacious!!!

In fact, the killing of OBL was about as low-risk an op as has ever been conducted.

Consider that “Risk” is a function of Threat, Vulnerability and Consequence.

Was OBL a “Threat” to us? Not hardly, he was virtually incognito as he hid.

Did our Vulnerability to a terror attck increase because of the OBL op? Again, not much. Need proof? What terror attack occurred post OBL?

What were the consequences should the OBL op fail? Pakistan get’s their panties in a wad? Really? We had been conducting drone attacks in Pakistan before the OBL op and we continue to conduct drone attacks there.

The amphibious landing at Inchon Korea belongs in any discussion about risky military operations. Talk about audacious and high-risk…

With due respect to our special forces men, Abbottabad wasn’t all that audacious. Audacious would have been SEALs dressed as Pakistani army officers kidnapping Osama in broad daylight and driving him across the Afghan border in a staff car. The Abbottabad mission was all about stealth, not audacity. And being stealthy is just as valueable as being audacious. Either way, the mission gets accomplished and the enemy gets pwned.

I think we are making a mistake here. While certainly other plans of the past 500 years were audacious–Cortez in Mexico, German Von Schlieffen plan, German decision to attack Russia in 1941, Washington at Trenton, Japanese decision to go to war with the United States, Cushing’s plan to sink the Albermarle, the Raid on Entebbe, etc.–what needs to be kept in mind is that they only involved the risks of the deaths of everone involved and/or complete and utter defeat and ruin for the attacking nation.

Whereas Barack Obama was risking an almost-certain Academy award nomination for Best Supporting Actor. And re-election as President. Thus, it should be clear that there really is no comparison between Obama’s higher order of magnitude daring and everybody else’s. The man just has balls.

If the voters of Delaware aren’t embarassed about sending this character to the US Senate for 30 years they should be. And now he is a breath away from leader of the free world…..!
We not only have a sometime, swears he’s not, Muslim as the most powerful man in the world we have this idiot ready to step into his shoes. How ridiculous do we look to the rest of the world? I would just imagine the British press and others have a hay day with this news of the absurd from the good old USA.

The comments here will keep me happily busy learning about history.
Some of them I knew about: Entebbe immediately came to mind when I read Biden’s trademark gaffe, and Osirak came to mind by association.
Just for fun (though it is kind of black humor), here are a few others that have not yet been mentioned:
Saragarhi
Tsushima
Beersheba
the Winter War
the battle of Mogadishu
Henri Guisan’s plan to defend Switzerland from a Nazi invasion: it was so audacious that it did not need to be put into action.

If we are talking about bravery in general, not just in the military, then let’s not forget Jim Corbett. He did not risk losing his bid for re-election: he risked being ripped to pieces by man-eating tigers and leopards.